New Laptop/Windows XP/Vista

[Bob Isaac]

My son's company has bought Dell Precision 4300 Series laptops with XP Pro and 4Gb RAM - it flies. So I bought one as well.

Bob

[kathynewman]

Kathy

why did you not buy a dell with xp pro on it already?

and yep office 2000 is fine, just a second opinion

D

Because we found what we think was a good deal with an Acer but only downside was it had Vista so felt it was worth the extra to buy Pro (must remember to order it today!). Having read around and talked to people Acer seemed more recommended than Dell - and in end had to go with one or the other!

[Sean Williams]

unbent or bent, a paper clip is a "must have" item in any IT hardware tech support's toolkit

Rather. I have several - by each cd-rom drive, in my wallet, in the kitchen, by the dvd player and naturally a couple of spares whose location I can't remember.
And of course a large pot of bent paper clips, just in case.
The missus says I need to get out more - what does she mean?

[Mark H]

Perhaps she just means pop down the pub to show others your collection...

[Bob Isaac]

Watch out for this

Having set up my nice new Dell Precision M4300 with XP Pro I find that I needed binoculars not glasses to see what is on the screen. Two options. Change screen res to a lower one or increase dpi from 96.

I changed the dpi to 120dpi. Great, untill I looked at web sites. All the images were blocky. So to the other option, lower screen res. Everything was fuzzy.

I contacted Dell who were able to reproduce this, even on a separate 20 inch LCD.

They say this is working as designed. What nonsense. It seems it is only the 1680x1050 res LCD has this. My son's lappy has the higher 1920x1200 LCD and has crystal clear of everything at any screen res or dpi setting.

The bit that really wound me up is that the option to upgrade the LCD when configuring the lappy on the Dell web site does not appear when starting at the top priced option of the 3 options.

Since Dell will not classify this as a fault my only option was to return the lap[py for a refund and order a new one with the 1920 LCD.

The attached piccy is from the Dell homepage. And they still insist the screen is working as designed.

Bob